Friday, September 25, 2009

Journal of the plague year

Is mine the only campus plastered with flyers--rephotocopied so many times that their graphics have disappeared and their smaller-font text is unreadable--urging us to COVER YOUR COUGH, WASH YOUR HANDS, and STAY HOME if we feel sick?

There are four different ones in the ladies' room nearest my classroom.

12 comments:

We don't have posters, but every flat surface is supposed to have a bottle of hand sanitizer on it, and we have been told to scold students who cough or sneeze into their hands instead of their sleeves or décolletages.

We don't have anything, not even working soap dispensers in some of the bathrooms, because the administration's standard approach to anything vaguely unpleasant is to stick their heads in the sand and deny it. Ergo, no swine flu here.

What if they cough or sneeze into someone else's décolletage? (That's a public health campaign that could really take off.)

I haven't seen Purell dispensers this fall, but at graduation in May there were jumbo dispensers on either side of the stage; each student had to pause & pump before collecting diploma and shaking hands with the Prez.

There suddenly are bottles of hand sanitizer everywhere in my department--I don't know if they're gratis of the department, or of the 2 admins who run the office and whose pens, pencils, and staplers are always being grabbed and used by the faculty and students.

Are your flyers the ones that warn that people might be REQUIRED to wear surgical masks? I always wonder about that -- who's gonna do the requiring and where are they gonna get all the necessary masks?

RG: Yep. We've been told the same thing about attendance--basically, we can't require or enforce attendance policies, on the grounds that it's better for someone who might have the flu to stay home than to infect others. . . and if there is indeed an outbreak, the health center will have more important things to do than verify/document individual cases.

We have otherwise-clear plastic stickers on our bathroom mirrors with bright red text in the center warning STOP THE FLU: Wash your hands. And I just came from a restroom visit in which a very paranoid and germaphobic woman carried a paper towel to the door, used the towel to open the door, and then dropped the towel on the floor as she exited.